Crowley: 'I wanted to move it along'

10/17/12 12:33 PM EDT

Candy Crowley's post-debate media tour has been dominated by questions about her decision to fact-check Mitt Romney on the president's Rose Garden remarks following the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya. Her explanation, in short, has been that she was just trying to move things along.

What I was trying to do, by the way … I was trying to move this along... Then we got hung up on, ‘Yes, I did,’ ‘No, I didn’t,’ ‘I said terror,’ ‘You didn’t say terror.’ There was this point where they both kind of looked at me. Romney was looking at me, the president was looking at me. What I wanted to do was move this along.

And this afternoon on The View:

Right after, I looked at Mitt Romney and I said, 'But you are right, it took them weeks to talk about --- ' But nobody remembers that....

I was actually trying to move the conversation along. We were really moving, and they got stuck on this word: 'You didn't say it,' 'Yes I did.' The larger thing is: what took them so long, why were they so wrong in the first place. And I looked at Romney and said, 'But you are right.'

Crowley is right insofar as fewer people remember the second part of her fact-check, which she would reiterate in a separate post-debate interview with CNN when she said that Romney was "right in the main" but “picked the wrong word." Specifically, the president did use the word "terror," but Romney was right that it took the administration two weeks to wholeheartedly and proactively acknowledge that it was a terrorist attack.

But if Crowley was just trying to move the conversation along, it didn't work. Romney's larger point was quickly eclipsed by his error on "terror."

The takeaway is that Romney fumbled. New York Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal could hardly contain himself: He called it "Romney's Rose Garden moment," comparable to George H.W. Bush staring at his watch or Gerald Ford denying Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — two of the most disastrous moments in this history of presidential debates.